The Captain Read online

  Dutton

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by David Wright and Anthony DiComo

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for.

  ISBN 9781524746056 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781524746063 (ebook)

  Cover photograph by Nick Laham / Getty Images

  pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  This book is dedicated to all the Mets fans who welcomed a twenty-one-year-old kid from Virginia into their lives and, through their love and support, made him a New Yorker.

  CONTENTS

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  INTRODUCTION

  ONE

  THE PUDGY KID AT SHORTSTOP

  TWO

  TIDEWATER BOYS

  THREE

  “ADULT STUFF”

  FOUR

  THE GRIND

  FIVE

  GOING HOME AGAIN

  SIX

  FLIP-FLOPS AND KARAOKE

  SEVEN

  BIGGER, FASTER, STRONGER

  EIGHT

  FAME

  NINE

  OCTOBER

  TEN

  COLLAPSE

  ELEVEN

  DÉJÀ VU

  TWELVE

  RED, WHITE, AND BLUE

  THIRTEEN

  A STRANGER AT HOME

  FOURTEEN

  PLAYING THROUGH PAIN

  FIFTEEN

  COMMITMENTS

  SIXTEEN

  CAPTAIN AMERICA

  SEVENTEEN

  THE FACE OF MLB

  EIGHTEEN

  SPINAL STENOSIS

  NINETEEN

  COOKIES

  TWENTY

  OCTOBER, AGAIN

  TWENTY-ONE

  FALL CLASSIC

  TWENTY-TWO

  BACK, NECK, SHOULDER

  TWENTY-THREE

  LAST CHANCE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

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  I thought I was going to throw up.

  By age thirty-five, I figured I had experienced most everything one could on a baseball diamond. I was a first-round draft pick who had been to a World Series and seven All-Star Games. I had twice represented my country at the World Baseball Classic, wearing the letters “USA” across my chest. I’d swung my bat thousands of times for the team I’d grown up loving. I’d stared down the greatest closer who ever lived on one of the game’s most pressure-packed stages. But until this day, I had never felt the emotion of standing in uniform, knowing I was wearing it for the final time.

  Seven years earlier, I’d fractured my back on a hustle play at third base, beginning a health spiral that would ultimately end my career. In 2015, doctors diagnosed me with stenosis, a degenerative narrowing of the spinal canal. Twice a day that summer, I ground through the monotony of physical therapy, trying to will my body to cooperate. It worked, at least temporarily; I made it to the World Series for the first time that autumn, even hitting a go-ahead home run early in Game 3. But the injuries never ceased. The next year, my neck required surgery. Then my shoulder. Then my back. Late in 2018, I finally admitted to myself that I would never truly return to the field on my terms. So the Mets and I hatched a plan: I would suit up for two final games before calling it a career.

  That is how I found myself in the on-deck circle at Citi Field in New York City, bent in a crouch, trying to prepare for my first at-bat in twenty-eight months. I remembered being nervous for my big league debut and the World Series, and for dozens of moments in between. But I had never felt like this, physically sick, unsure if I could stand up and make the short walk to home plate. My legs wobbled as a sold-out crowd chanted my name. I took a couple of practice cuts and then the inning ended with me stranded on deck. Back to the dugout I retreated, hoping to regain my composure.

  From the time I was young, baseball meant everything to me. My father helped introduce me to the game in our backyard, installing a homemade tee made out of concrete, a PVC pipe, and a little bit of rubber, and hanging a fishnet between two trees so I could hit balls into it. Growing up, I attended minor league games in my coastal Virginia hometown, then watched on television as those players broke into the majors. I wanted badly to become one of them, and eventually I succeeded, playing for the only team I’d ever rooted for as a kid.

  Maybe from the outside, it seems like things came easy to me. They didn’t. As much as I tried to do everything the right way, my career wasn’t about skating by without adversity. It was about refusing to let pain define me. It was about the value of hard work, of perseverance, of living life in a manner that leaves no room for regrets.

  As the years passed, my body failed me, making it impossible to go out on my terms. But at least I could dictate a small part of my ending. After another half inning passed that night at Citi, I grabbed a bat and walked back onto the field, steeled a bit better this time to keep the crowd from frazzling my nerves. I made my way back into the on-deck circle, looped my bat in an arc around each shoulder, then dropped into a squat to survey the field—the site of some of my greatest triumphs as a baseball player, and also some of my most jarring failures.

  Then I stood back up and strode to the plate.

  ONE

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  THE PUDGY KID AT SHORTSTOP

  To this day, my father isn’t sure quite what possessed him. Shortly after I was born, once the initial bursts of elation and exhaustion and emotion had faded, my dad, Rhon, had a chance to steal away from the hospital for a few hours. Intending to drive straight home for a bit of rest, he instead found himself pulling into the parking lot of a local department store. This was a few days before Christmas, and as he puts it, the shelves were mostly bare—but there was my dad, rummaging around them long enough to find a plastic glove, a kid-sized Louisville Slugger, and a cheap baseball.

  Rhon Wright was never much of an athlete, too short for basketball and too small for football, but he did play baseball and enjoyed the game. He wanted to instill that same love in me.

  In the weeks that followed, my grandmother constructed a wooden plaque with prongs sticking out of it to hold the bat, as well as spots to store the glove and ball. That contraption hung on my bedroom wall from the first days of my life until I was old enough to go play outside with them. They were perfect. At first, I could barely lift the bat, but I never got tired of trying alongside my father and grandfather in the backyard. When I got older, my dad told me to swing it underwater, because he had read that that was how Gregg Jefferies trained. I was probably better equipped to handle a Wiffle-ball bat, which I often did, standing with my back to my grandfather’s pool and trying to hit his looping pitches for hours.

  To say I was predisposed to a love of baseball would probably be an understatement. From the time that I could walk, everything on both sides of my family r
evolved around a ball and a bat.

  So enthused was I about the game that, one afternoon, when my mother, Elisa, spied a Little League team playing, she stopped the car, got out, and asked someone at the field how old I had to be to register. Turned out I was a year too young, but the next spring, I was out there in uniform, ready to make my Green Run Little League debut. I showed up with the same wooden bat my dad had bought on his way home from the hospital, which embarrassed him only a little when he realized all the other kids were swinging aluminum.

  We learned that sort of stuff on the fly. Quickly, Saturday turned into the best day of the week. I would wake up and spend all day at the field. I would eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the concession stand, watch the other games, and play in mine, loving every second of it. Three younger brothers—Stephen, Matthew, and Daniel—eventually came along, one every three years. We all played baseball. None of us could get enough.

  What’s amazing to me now, looking back, is how much my parents sacrificed to help make that possible.

  * * *

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  My dad was raised in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia, which in those days was generally just referred to as Tidewater. It encompasses Norfolk, the biggest city in the area; Virginia Beach, where I grew up; Chesapeake, where we moved when I was a teenager; and several other communities. Dad met Mom at a local roller-skating rink, convinced her to go on a double date with two other friends, and managed to turn that one date into many more. Rhon and Elisa became high school sweethearts. In 1978, when she was nineteen and he was only eighteen, they got married.

  At the time, my mom was working at the local Navy Exchange store, while my dad was earning some cash at an auto dealership with his uncle, selling muscle cars, which were all the rage. Within a couple of years, they switched: She started working at the dealership, doing bookkeeping and other tasks, while he worked security at the Navy Exchange, rooting out shoplifters. That sparked Rhon’s interest in law enforcement, and once he was eligible at age twenty-one, he applied to the police academies in Norfolk and Virginia Beach. Norfolk, a much more urban area with some relatively high crime rates, called him back first. A career was born.

  Until I grew older, I wasn’t really aware of the dangerous nature of my father’s work. Flipping through channels as a kid, I watched Cops and saw the officers busting down doors and catching bad guys, but my brothers and I always thought there was no way my dad did that sort of stuff. When we all sat together for family dinners, my father never talked about his work. My parents completely shielded us from it, even if that wasn’t totally on purpose. To Rhon, the work didn’t always seem all that dangerous. To me and my brothers, it was just what he did. Our biggest thrill was having him flip on the siren for us as we drove around town in an unmarked police car. Sometimes, we’d get to wear screen-printed T-shirts that the officers made to celebrate successful missions, even though we didn’t really know everything that went into them.

  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned the truth from a couple of his partners at a local gym.

  “Your dad was a bad dude,” one of them told me.

  “Him?” I replied, incredulous.

  Him. I had always pictured Rhon with his feet up at the local precinct, donut in hand, pushing paper from behind his desk. But when his friends started opening my eyes with stories of his time on the beat, I learned that he actually was that guy in Cops, breaking down doors and catching bad guys. Rhon started out on precinct patrol, wearing a uniform, driving his cop car around town. Eventually, he worked his way into the K-9 unit, which doubled as the Norfolk Police Department’s SWAT team. If the situation required advanced weaponry or tactical expertise, my dad would get the call.

  Promotions throughout the 1980s took him out of uniform but not out of danger. Going undercover for the department’s vice and narcotics division, Rhon eventually took charge of that entire unit, leading armed missions involving informants and search warrants and criminals hawking drugs. On one such mission, a fleeing perp shot at him from a distance in a city park. Another time, my dad and a partner wrestled a man brandishing a knife to the ground. There were plenty of other scrapes along the way. Rhon didn’t reach the paper-pushing, donut-eating phase of his career until much later, when he topped out as Norfolk’s assistant chief of police. At that point, I was really only just beginning to understand the nature of his previous work.

  My dad took his job seriously and was very, very good at it. That translated to life at home, where he created the type of culture you might expect from a cop. My brothers like to joke that we lived in the strictest home in Virginia, and as the oldest of four boys, I had it worst. We were taught to say, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to the adults we encountered. We were taught to shake hands and look people in the eyes. Curfews were strict. Punishments were no joke, often involving my parents’ threatening to take baseball away from me and my brothers. At that age, I’m not sure I could have imagined a more terrifying fate.

  My mom, Elisa, eventually moved from her work at the car dealership to jobs as a teacher’s assistant and a school security officer, where she spent all day dealing with kids. She was definitely the more lenient of our parents, so we often went to her to try to plead down punishments. We simply couldn’t get anything past Dad, who could sense the smallest fib. He was strict and punctual. If he told me to be home by ten o’clock and I snuck upstairs at 10:04, he wouldn’t say anything that night. Instead, he’d wait until the next morning to ask what time I got home.

  “Ten o’clock,” I’d tell him.

  “Did you?” Dad would reply.

  “Yeah,” I’d say.

  “Did you?” he’d ask again.

  A pause. “No,” I’d admit under the pressure of his questioning. “It was ten oh four.”

  And 10:04 wasn’t okay. That was his nature. He’d ask simple questions about things like schoolwork, allowing us to bury ourselves with our answers. If I made a B in one of my classes, I always knew the question would come: “Could you have done better?” I couldn’t say no, because there was always something more I could have done. That lesson was always there, always lurking in the back of my mind. He wanted us to fulfill our potential. He wanted to make sure that we didn’t have regrets. He wanted to make sure that we maximized our abilities, and without that sort of upbringing, I’m not sure we would have.

  As one of our Little League coaches, my dad was also tougher on me than on anyone else on the team. I thought I deserved to play shortstop, where all the best athletes played. Instead, Dad put me in the outfield, saying I needed to earn my way onto the dirt. I was upset, but that’s just the way he was. He made me earn everything, which I eventually did—my claim to fame as a youth baseball player occurred when I hit two home runs in a Little League All-Star Game. Doing that, while getting to wear the cool jerseys, made for one of the best days of my young life.

  Looking back now, the sort of discipline my dad instilled in me was pretty critical to my development. Even once Rhon let me play the infield, I was no natural-born athlete. I was actually a little round as a child, which made for some early life lessons when I started playing football in addition to baseball. Teams were decided by weight, not age, and if I wanted to play within my normal age group, I had to tip the scales at a certain amount.

  When that became an issue one autumn, I found myself at risk of having to move up a level. My dad used it as motivation, teaching me about my body and the things I would need to do to become an elite athlete. That summer, he was working on the SWAT team at the police department, so it was paramount that he keep in shape. Rhon went jogging daily, usually for up to five miles at a clip, in addition to all the running he did at work. While he never made me go with him, let’s just say he lovingly recommended it. Inevitably, on those runs, I’d fall behind and my dad would snap his fingers loudly, encouraging me to catch up. It worked, helping me cut weight and lear
n about my body. But it wasn’t all that fun. I remember some days I’d come home from school and shower by five P.M., thinking if I had already showered, I wouldn’t have to go jogging.

  On weekends, we’d run charity 5Ks and 10Ks. Again, this wasn’t my favorite way to spend a Saturday, but I could see the transformation in my body. I made weight at football, building the foundation I would need to stay in shape throughout my big league career. During the off-season, I became a runner myself, sometimes dragging my brothers with me to an old landfill in Virginia Beach called Mount Trashmore. We would sprint up, jog across the top, do sets of push-ups, and run down. Football might not have worked out as a career, but it wasn’t because of my weight or my effort. It was because I hated getting tackled. What can I say? I was soft.

  I was also fast and athletic, despite my weight. In one youth game, an opposing coach came up to my coach at the time, Allan Erbe, and said, “I wish my team would hit more balls to your pudgy shortstop.”

  “I wish they would, too,” Erbe shot back.

  It’s easy to look back on those years and see how lucky I was, but at the time, I don’t think I appreciated the discipline and structure my parents instilled in me and my brothers. I might not have fully realized how important it was until I wound up having kids myself. Back in those days, it could be infuriating when my dad was tough on me. I probably slammed a lot of doors around the house. I probably cursed under my breath quite a bit. I can’t even count the number of times I was fuming mad because I felt like the punishment for some transgression didn’t fit the crime. But when I look back now, I understand the discipline helped me make choices that I might not have made had my parents raised me differently. I doubt I would have accomplished what I did without that grounding in my youth.

  That doesn’t mean I always avoided trouble. When I was in middle school, as my paternal grandparents’ health was starting to fail, we decided that we would sell our house, they would sell theirs, and we would all move together to a new home in Chesapeake. While my grandparents were in the process of selling their home, we went over there and played some basketball in their driveway. My brother Matt lofted up a shot that I knew I could block. Despite the fact that he was six years younger than me, those old competitive juices started flowing, and I crushed the ball directly into one of the garage windows, smashing it to pieces. Neither of my parents was too happy with that one.